The present application relates generally to an improved data processing apparatus and method and more specifically to mechanisms for providing a virtual machine monitor bridge to bare-metal booting.
A hypervisor, also referred to as a virtual machine monitor (VMM), allows multiple operating systems to run concurrently on a host system, such as a host computer or server providing computing services to host systems. Such a feature is often referred to as hardware virtualization. The hypervisor may present guest operating systems with a virtual platform and may monitor the execution of the guest operating system. In this way, multiple operating systems, including multiple instances of the same operating system, can share hardware resources of a data processing system, either a stand-alone data processing system or distributed data processing system.
Hypervisors are generally classified as being either Type 1 or Type 2. A Type 1 hypervisor (or native, bare metal hypervisor) runs directly on the host's hardware for controlling the hardware and for monitoring guest operating systems. A guest operating system thus runs on another operating system environment, with the hypervisor layer as a distinct second software level, and the guest operating systems running at another level above the hardware.